The essay about tuneyards' sales (lack of) is interesting. At 47,000 copies sold and 135 votes, that means the voters actually equal about 1/3 of 1 percent of the sales. (Not that many of the voters probably actually bought the thing.)

I like 1, 5, 8 and 10 on Chuck's list. And I'm glad to see he and I weren't the only two to put 2NE1's "I Am The Best" on our singles ballots. (Yes, I filed a singles ballot this year, for the first time ever, and it was all composed of actual singles.)

considering the amount of attention it got, managing to get 20 critics on board for the song isn't exactly an overwhelming victory. There were more pieces written about how she was a shitty rapper than there were voters for her in a poll

The critical establishment's dogmatic popism eliminates any consideration of the philosophy surrounding the creative and commercial genesis of music and elevates the aesthetic, so whatever sounds best must be best, and now somehow independent music has wound up in a place where Beyoncé is on the same purely aesthetic playing field that Sharon Van Etten is, because it makes you powerfully, stinkingly uncool to point out that Beyoncé is a meticulously calculated, choreographed, and focus group-approved product of the same system that Sharon Van Etten's forebears in independent music rose up as a direct response to. Suddenly Sharon Van Etten sounds a little thin without the help of a billion-dollar machine. Like Mitt Romney said: "Corporations are people, too, my friend."David Shapiro

The critical establishment's dogmatic popism eliminates any consideration of the philosophy surrounding the creative and commercial genesis of music and elevates the aesthetic, so whatever sounds best must be best, and now somehow independent music has wound up in a place where Beyoncé is on the same purely aesthetic playing field that Sharon Van Etten is, because it makes you powerfully, stinkingly uncool to point out that Beyoncé is a meticulously calculated, choreographed, and focus group-approved product of the same system that Sharon Van Etten's forebears in independent music rose up as a direct response to. Suddenly Sharon Van Etten sounds a little thin without the help of a billion-dollar machine. Like Mitt Romney said: "Corporations are people, too, my friend."David Shapiro